Who Was the First Counter-Reformation Pope?

ELISABETH G. GLEASON President of the American Catholic Historical Association 1994 The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXI APRIL, 1995 No. 2 WHO WAS THE FIRST COUNTER REFORMATION POPE? BY Elisabeth G. Gleason* The Counter-Reformation, once the almost exclusive preserve of Catholic scholars, has assumed a different physiognomy in studies published during the last ten or fifteen years. Older schemes divided sixteenth-century Catholic church history into two distinct periods, the pre- and post-Tridentine, with the Council as the watershed between them. Adopting this division, it was easy to define the CounterReformation in a straightforward fashion chronologically as following the Council of Trent, and structurally as the great offensive movement aimed not only at stopping the tide of Protestantism, but also at reversing the patterns of Protestant gains and Catholic losses on the religious map of Western and Central Europe. Recent studies have introduced a number of changes and refinements into this older image of the Counter-Reformation. Continuities rather than discontinuities have been stressed, and the connections •Mrs. Gleason is a professor of history in the University of San Francisco. She read this paper as her presidential address at a luncheon held in the Chicago Hilton Hotel on Saturday, January 7, 1995, during the seventy-fifth annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association. 173 174 WHO WAS THE FIRST COUNTER-REFORMATION POPE? between ideas of reform during the first and second half of the sixteenth century have been established.1 New concepts have been introduced into the way scholars approach the Counter-Reformation, and the kind ofquestions they pursue. Foremost among them probably is the concept of Sozialdisziplinierung, or the exploration of new and more pervasive forms of control over the Christian people exercised by the Church and later, the state.2 They included, for example, the requirement of proof that laypeople had fulfilled their Easter duty, or the increasing bureaucratization of the parish clergy. Methods from other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology have been brought to bear on analyses of the Counter-Reformation, which, interestingly enough, has become a new frontier in early modern history. Witness, for example, recent attempts to see the remarkable clustering of the so-called "New Orders" as an integral part of sixteenth-century history,3 rather than as a phenomenon which concerned only the Catholic Church. Another example of methodologically innovative works has been the result ofthe current emphasis on contacts between European and non-Western cultures. This vast topic has reopened the whole subject of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic missionary activity to more sophisticated analysis than it has traditionally received, for instance, in Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.4 When compared to these new developments, the history of the papacy has received relatively little attention.5 Although Paolo Prodi's innovative The Papal Prince6 examined the institutional aspects of the papal monarchy, the book has so far remained magisterial and isolated without becoming the inspiration for more works along similar lines. We have no new biography of a Counter-Reformation pope, except for¦For excellent bibliographical introductions to major topics concerning the CounterReformation , see Catholicism in Early Modem History: A Guide to Research, ed John O'Malley, SJ. (St. Louis, 1988). 2The basic essay on these topics remains Wolfgang Reinhard, "Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters," Archiv für ReformationsgeschichtelArchivefor Reformation History, 68 (1977), 226-252. 'See the recent volume onReligious Orders ofthe CatholicReformation, ed. Richard L. De Molen (New York, 1994). 4New York, 1984. The stimulating essay by Wolfgang Reinhard, "Reformpapsttum zwischen Renaissance und Barock," in Reformatio Ecclesiae. FestschriftfürErwin Iserloh, ed. Remigius Bäumer (Paderborn, 1980), pp. 779-796, offers numerous suggestions to future historians of the Counter-Reformation papacy. ^Because of the inadequacies of the English translation, the original version should be consulted: // sovrano Pontefice (Bologna, 1982). BY EUSABETH G. GLEASON 175 the recent one of Pius V,7 which breaks no new ground. In dealing with individual pontiffs, therefore, we still fall back on the work of historians like Ranke, Pastor, and Seppelt. It goes without saying that their studies, despite their great merit, were written in and for other times, and from our perspective are...